The Borgias (61 page)

The capture of d’Aubigny and the defeat at Cerignola had done nothing to diminish Louis XII’s hunger for Naples—a hunger sharpened by the knowledge that Ferdinand, his only competitor for the Neapolitan crown, was also his sole rival for first place among the monarchs of Europe. The survivors of Cerignola were still limping homeward when Louis undertook the creation, at Parma, of a replacement army under Louis de La Trémoille, a commander whose war record in Brittany and impressive performance following Charles VIII’s retreat from Naples made him seem a possible match for Gonsalvo. The do-or-die character of the campaign that La Trémoille was about to launch, the knowledge that failure this time could put Naples out of reach for the foreseeable future, made it imperative that the troops of the Borgias become involved on the French side.

After all he had done for Cesare, Louis must have been appalled to find the Borgias driving a hard bargain. In return for full support they demanded the surrender of Bracciano and a free hand to do as they wished in Tuscany—to do as they wished, that is, with Florence and Siena and all the territories traditionally ruled by those cities. These things were out of the question, not only because La Trémoille’s army in advancing on Naples was going to have to pass through Tuscany, but because there were no circumstances under which King Louis could have accepted such a further expansion of Roman, or Borgia, power. Thus ended the alliance with France. It was replaced by an uneasy neutrality that left Alexander and Cesare hanging somewhere between a failing and resentful Louis XII and a Spain that was becoming so powerful as to have little need for Italian friends in Rome or elsewhere. When Gonsalvo took possession of the city of Naples in mid-May, his triumph signaled that Spain had replaced France as Europe’s dominant power. It did nothing, however, to resolve the nagging question of how
the Borgias should relate to the two powers, or to settle the rift between Alexander and Cesare. Predictably, Alexander wanted to repair his old friendship with Ferdinand. Cesare’s position was probably shrewder, if little less predictable. He argued that, while Ferdinand could if he chose treat Rome with cold indifference and had no reason to care if the Borgias succeeded or failed, Louis XII’s need was greater than ever. If he retrieved his position in Naples, this king whose marriage to Anne of Brittany was producing only daughters and stillborn sons would be in a position to reward his friends extravagantly. Even if he failed in Naples, he would continue to dominate northern Italy and have the power to decide Cesare’s fate in the Romagna and elsewhere.

Strange things were happening, symptoms of a deeply unsettled time and impenetrable intrigues. In May Cesare issued orders for the arrest, wherever he might be found, of a Monsignor Francesco Troches, one of the pope’s secretaries. After being pursued from Rome to Civitavecchia and then to Genoa and Sardinia, Troches was finally apprehended in Corsica. He then either committed suicide by throwing himself off the galley returning him to Italy or, depending on which story is believed, was brought back to Rome and quietly executed. What this was all about has never been entirely explained, but the most persuasive hypothesis is that he had been discovered spying for France—providing information about the pope’s surreptitious attempts to revive his long-dead lines of communication with Ferdinand and Spain.

The body of another of Alexander’s close associates, Jacopo da Santa Croce, was found one morning on one of the Tiber bridges. People were reminded of the discovery, on a morning in the Romagna many months before, of the body of Cesare’s man Lorqua. Was this too a message of some kind? If so, what
was
the message? And who was it
for
? Who, for that matter, was sending it? Could Cesare possibly be sending anonymous signals to the pope? None of the proffered answers was particularly convincing. The atmosphere in Rome was growing dark and ominous.

Word circulated—supposedly leaked out of the Vatican—that the pope was negotiating with Maximilian of Hapsburg, the Holy Roman emperor-elect, to have Pisa, Siena, and Lucca all bestowed on Cesare as imperial fiefs. Which would have been interesting, even meaningful, if
the emperor were in a position to do anything in Italy. But he had little enough power north of the Alps, thanks to the political fragmentation of Germany, and absolutely none farther south.

It was said too that Louis XII was offering to give all of Naples to Cesare in trade for the Romagna and Bologna. Which might have made sense if the king were in possession of Naples, which he no longer was. Or if Cesare had any voice at all in the status of Bologna, which of course he didn’t.

At the furthest extreme of absurdity, it was said finally that Alexander was talking with Venice about having Cesare elected pope. The variety and increasing improbability of these stories is less reflective of anything actually happening than of the prevailing confusion and fear.

Behind all the nonsense, however, lay one monumental reality. Circumstances and his own actions had converged to raise Cesare above every other prince in Italy, kings from the outside of course excluded. As the summer of 1503 began, everything seemed to be—and in fact almost everything was—working in his favor. The city of Rome and its nobles, the papal bureaucracy, the College of Cardinals—all had been subdued and were under Cesare’s control either directly or through the pope. The baronial clans that for centuries had been the bane of every pope had been beaten, scattered, slaughtered. The tyrants who until recently had ruled city after city across the Papal States were mostly dead or in exile; only the Ferrara of the Este and the Bologna of the Bentivoglio were not yet under Borgia rule. Ferdinand of Spain had no need to interfere with Cesare, Louis of France no wish to offend him or the pope. Cesare had an army under Michelotto encamped at Perugia awaiting orders, and he was at liberty to do with it almost anything he wished.

Cesare spent most of July in the Romagna, making preparations for whatever it was he intended to do next. Early in the month he had assembled his cavalry, including newly hired units of Albanian light horse for which he clearly had big plans, for a grand review in which he himself rode proudly at the head of the lead squadron and Michelotto led the second. Three days later Alexander appointed him vicar in perpetuity of the late Vitellozzo Vitelli’s old home base of Città di Castello. This made Cesare lord of a substantial city at the very edge of Florentine
territory, a good platform for a move against Florence itself. It seemed yet another provocation, deliberate if oblique, of Louis XII.

At the start of August, with all in readiness but his intentions as secret as ever, Cesare made a visit to Rome. He found the city in the grip of one of the stifling midsummer heat waves for which it has always been notorious. The pope was in residence, having found it impossible to withdraw to the cool of the hills with so much going on, but Cesare found him in robust good health and his old high spirits. All Rome was electric with expectation; La Trémoille’s troops were known to be in Tuscany and on their way south, which meant that the next showdown between France and Spain was imminent. Fever was rampant in the city and indeed in the Vatican, as was to be expected in Rome at this time of year. Among its victims was one of Alexander’s oldest friends, the elder of the two cardinals named Giovanni Lanzol Borgia. “It is a bad month for us fat people,” the pope ruefully observed as a procession took his cousin’s body to its grave.

On August 5 a Vatican regular named Adriano Castelli da Corneto, a onetime secretary to the pope and one of the latest crop of new cardinals, gave a party at his hillside vineyard in Rome. Alexander attended, as did Cesare; probably it was a going-away party organized in the latter’s honor.

No doubt it was an afternoon of good food, good wine, the jollity with which the Borgias always spiced social occasions, and—especially as the sun began to set—swarms of river-bred mosquitoes. It certainly was among the most fateful parties ever to take place in Europe. It is possible that the whole subsequent history of Italy, and certain that the remaining chapters in the story of the Borgias, would have turned out very differently if it had never been given. Or if Cesare, at least, had not been in Rome to attend.

Background
 
 SUPERSTITIONS: ANOTHER SIDE OF THE RENAISSANCE

SEARCHING FOR RATIONAL EXPLANATIONS OF WHY EVEN SOME of the most powerful figures in Renaissance Italy did the things they did when they did them can be a fool’s errand. With improbable frequency such people acted less on the basis of a cool analysis of whatever predicament they happened to be in, or a careful weighing of their options, or even what they were feeling, than in accordance with what their astrologers told them.

This is part of a dark, or at least a singularly unimpressive, side of the world that produced the Borgias. Fact-based knowledge of the inner workings of the physical universe being as limited as it was in that world, superstition was rampant. People at all levels of society turned for understanding and guidance not only to astrology but to its sister disciplines of alchemy and necromancy and various schools of magic. If this is not often mentioned, the reason may be that it does not easily fit in with what we like to think about the Renaissance.
We want to think of it as a period of glorious achievements in arts and letters, not as a time when it was generally taken for granted that someone as hardheaded as Cesare Borgia could rely on someone else’s interpretation of what the stars were saying to arrive at decisions on which his future and his very life might depend.

Astrology’s roots were deep, reaching back to the beginnings of recorded history in Egypt, Babylon, Persia, China, and the Greco-Roman world. This is understandable; as people began to observe the patterns and movements of the heavens, it is hardly surprising that they should have searched for meaning in what they saw. Astrology was widely followed in the Roman Empire until Constantine the Great, having converted to Christianity, launched a persecution of its practitioners that would keep it underground for half a millennium. In conjunction with astronomy it flourished in the Arab world, however, and as contacts
between Arabs and Christians became more common and intense, especially in Spain, astrology resurfaced and was soon again widespread.

The greatest of the thirteenth century’s Holy Roman emperors, Frederick II, went nowhere without his astrologers.
The Gian Galeazzo Visconti who in the fourteenth century became Milan’s first duke acknowledged that “I observe astrology in all my affairs,” his fifteenth-century successor Ludovico Sforza saw to the appointment of four professors of astrology at the University of Pavia, and an acquaintance of Duke Ercole d’Este complained that he “fills up his time with astrology and necromancy.” By Ercole’s time there was almost no such thing as an Italian court that did not employ astrologers; this was no less true of the Medici of Florence and the equally cultivated Montefeltri of Urbino than of the most brutish warlords. Alone or in conjunction with such other practices as geomancy (deciphering the patterns formed by a handful of thrown earth) and chiromancy (palm reading), astrology was used to foretell the future and decide what should be done, or when, or where. The secrets of the stars were applied in the practice of medicine and had an accepted place in the administration of justice.

Not surprisingly, considering the challenge that the fatalistic determinism implicit in astrology posed for orthodox Christianity, astrology was opposed by the Church from its earliest days. In the fourteenth century the great humanist scholar Petrarch ridiculed it with icy contempt. A hundred years after him the philosopher Pico della Mirandola attacked it with such devastating effect, pointing to its incompatibility with Christian notions of free will and divine providence, as to reduce its popularity noticeably. It persisted all the same. Though Pope Pius II was stern in his condemnation, Sixtus IV was a devoted believer, and so was his nephew Cardinal Giuliano della Rovere. Much later, in the sixteenth century, there would be periods when ambassadors were not admitted to the papal court or that of the Holy Roman emperor until they had the approval of the official astronomers. One of Savonarola’s persistent criticisms of leading clerics of his day was their reliance on astrological readings. He never attacked Alexander VI on those grounds, however, and there is scant reason to think that Alexander, onetime protégé of the skeptical Pius II, took astrology at all seriously.

Wherever astrology was popular, alchemy was usually popular as well. Easily ridiculed for the attempts of practitioners to discover the so-called
philosopher’s stone and to use it to turn base metals into silver and gold, alchemy too had ancient roots and was not as childish as is generally believed. In its loftier forms it was a pursuit of purity and perfection: alchemists believed that if they could discover how to turn lead into the purest and most perfect of metals, gold, they would then be able to do something analogous with people, turning them not into gold but into superior beings, healthy, wise, and immensely long-lived.